Book Talk | Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town
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NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to a book talk for Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town featuring the author Colin Jerolmack in conversation with Harvey Molotch and Rebecca Elliott.
Shale gas extraction—commonly known as fracking—is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet—whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet—is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public’s consent.
The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend “up to heaven and down to hell,” which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself.
Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America’s ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors’ liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all.
The Institute of Public Knowledge at NYU in collaboration with Princeton University Press is pleased to offer a special discount to attendees of the IPK event with Colin Jerolmack, on his new book, Up to Heaven and Down to Hell. Please RSVP for more information.
Colin Jerolmack is a professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at NYU, chair of NYU’s Environmental Studies Department, and the author of The Global Pigeon.
Rebecca Elliott is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at LSE and Research Associate at the Centre for the Analysis of Risk Regulation. Rebecca’s work explores the intersection of climate change adaptation with questions of moral economy, the welfare state, environmental politics, and social theory. Her current project examines the economic and political governance of climate change, with a focus on insurance. She has previously conducted research on sustainable consumption.
Harvey Molotch is an Emeritus Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis and Sociology at NYU. known for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He helped create the field of environmental sociology and has advanced qualitative methods in the social sciences. In recent years, Molotch helped develop a new field—the sociology of objects.